Abstract
PRINCIPE is one of a group of four islands in the Gulf of Guinea. It is 17 kilometres long and 10 kilometres wide, and is 200 kilometres distant from the mainland. The main export of the island is cacao; sugar-cane, coffee, and palm kernel being practically negligible. For the cultivation of the cacao crop labour has been imported in the past from the African mainland. In all probability among these labourers there would be cases of sleeping sickness. These in themselves would constitute no danger to the island population or to their uninfected fellow-labourers, but in Principe unfortunately the carrier tsetse-fly, Glossina palpalis, also existed, and sleeping sickness mortality became so great that the economic life of the island was gravely menaced. The annual mortality was about 200 in a population of 3800 (average), so that in twenty years the mortality would be in excess of the total population.
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S., J. The Eradication of Sleeping Sickness from Principe 1 . Nature 98, 311–312 (1916). https://doi.org/10.1038/098311a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/098311a0